How to Use Hootsuite to Answer Social Messages in One Inbox

The short answer: give each person the right social account permission, set your availability in Nest, work the New queue until it is empty, filter paid comments away from organic ones, turn your most frequent answers into saved replies, move complaints to a private message, mask anything sensitive, let an AI assistant sort the queue through Hootsuite's Nest MCP server while a person sends every reply, and resolve each conversation when it is done. One person on Standard can run all of that; handing conversations between people starts on Advanced.

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Most social inboxes fail quietly. Nobody owns the comments under last Tuesday's ad, a refund question waits four days, and the person who knows the answer is on holiday. Nest does not fix ownership on its own, but it makes the gaps visible, and that is most of the job. What the product is and costs sits in the Hootsuite glossary entry.

Before you open Nest:

1. Price the rota, not the tool. For example, a care rota of three people on Advanced, where assignment lives, is 3 x $399 = $1,197 a month billed annually; the same three on Standard is 3 x $99 = $297, but nobody can hand a conversation to a colleague inside the tool (plans page, checked on 24 October 2026).
2. Start from last month's messages. Scroll back through the DMs and comments you already have and list the questions that came up most. Those become your saved replies in step 5.
3. Take a baseline by hand. Time your replies on a sample of 20 recent conversations before you switch. The built-in first response time metrics are for Advanced and Enterprise admins, per the Inbox metrics article, so on Standard your spreadsheet is the before picture.

What you need

• A plan or the trial. The trial is 14 days with no card, per the plans page.
• Admin rights on each social profile, so you can grant the permissions in step 1.
• Instagram message access switched on. Hootsuite's DM automation article asks for the "Allow access to messages" setting in the Instagram mobile app; without it, Instagram DMs will not reach the inbox in full.

Step 1: Decide who may reply to what

Go to Account, Settings, Social accounts, pick an account, open View social account details, then the Members tab, as the permissions article describes. The roles differ in ways that matter for care: a Responder can reply to public messages but not private ones, a Care Agent can do both, and masking is kept to the Care Supervisor, Editor and Advanced roles. Give a junior teammate Responder until you trust their DMs.

Step 2: Set your availability

In Nest, set yourself to Available or Away when you sign in. Available means the next conversation waiting in the New queue comes to you. To change the default, go to Settings, Personal preferences, General, Default availability, per the Standard and Professional inbox guide.

Step 3: Learn what each queue means

The same guide defines them. New holds conversations that need a reply; when you answer, the conversation moves to Pending, and it comes back to New the moment the contact writes again. All conversations shows everything unresolved. Resolved shows conversations closed in the last three months. Treat New as the only queue that has to reach zero by the end of the day.

Step 4: Split paid from organic

Select Filters at the top of the queue. The filter article lets you filter by channel, message type and post type, where Paid finds replies on your ads, including Instagram dark posts, and Organic finds comments on your own posts. Ad comments usually need a faster answer, because the post is still being paid to reach people. You can also filter Google Business Profile reviews by star rating and save any filtered view as a custom inbox.

Step 5: Turn repeat answers into saved replies

Open a conversation, select Add saved reply, then Create saved reply. Personal saved replies are visible only to you, and admins can share collections with the team, per the saved replies article. Write them from the list you made before you started, and edit each one before it goes out: a saved reply that ignores the customer's own words reads like a form letter.

Step 6: Take complaints private, once

For a public comment on Facebook, Instagram or X, choose Select message type and send a private message. The conversations article is clear about the limit the networks impose: you get one initial private message, and you can continue only if the contact replies. So make that first message complete, with the next step in it.

Step 7: Mask what should not be stored

People paste card numbers into DMs. Under Settings, Admin settings, Privacy and security, PII handling, an admin can allow manual masking and, on plans that have it, automatic masking of card and social security numbers, according to the masking article. A manual mask replaces the whole message with asterisks and cannot be undone. Hootsuite's Inbox FAQ also reminds customers that they are the data controller for what they load into the inbox, so the masking rule belongs in your care policy, not just the settings.

Step 8: Let an agent sort, and a person reply

Hootsuite runs a Nest MCP server at mcp.hootsuite.com/nest. In Claude, add it under Settings, Connectors, Add custom connector, and sign in with your Hootsuite workspace; ChatGPT, Copilot and Gemini are covered on the same MCP page. The page lists inbox overview, reading conversations, status changes, assignments, internal notes and saved replies among the things an assistant can do. Ask it each morning which open conversations look urgent and why, and to add an internal note on each. Then a person opens those conversations in Nest and sends the reply. The agent ranks; it does not speak for the brand.

Step 9: Resolve, so the queue tells the truth

When a contact's question is answered, select Resolve at the top of the reply area. A queue full of finished conversations hides the unfinished ones, and the next morning's triage starts from a false count.

What Hootsuite's own guides warn about

• Sort order is not message order. When you sort by date, Inbox uses the time a conversation changed status, not the time of the latest message, per the filter article.
• Boosted versions are invisible to DM automation. The DM automation article says only comments on the organic version of an Instagram post trigger it.
• Expired Instagram tokens. A Reconnect account label on an automation means Hootsuite can no longer send private messages until you reconnect.
• Manual masks are permanent. Check the message before you mask it.

How to know it is working

Re-time the same kind of sample after four weeks and compare it with your baseline: median time to first reply, and how many conversations sat in New overnight. If you move to Advanced, the Inbox metrics report average first response time per agent, counted on resolved conversations only, which is one more reason to resolve properly in step 9.

The "upgrade your plan" notes scattered through the help centre exist to sell the tier with assignment and routing. The tier you need is the one whose limit your sample shows you hitting: if one person clears New every day, Standard is doing its job.

FAQ

Can two people work the same conversation?

They can see it, and the plan table lists agent collision avoidance on every plan. Assigning a conversation to a named colleague, team settings and skill-based routing start on Advanced, per the plans page.

Does Hootsuite write replies with AI?

Smart replies exist, but the smart replies article addresses Enterprise agents with Advanced Inbox, and they do not work for Facebook or Instagram private messages or WhatsApp. On Standard, saved replies do the heavy lifting.

Will Google reviews show up in Nest?

Yes. The filter article lists Google Business Profile reviews as a filter, by star rating and review type.